Last hurrah for women's soccer veterans

By Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle

Although that celebratory scene of Brandi Chastain peeling off her jersey after scoring the game-winner in the World Cup finals occurred just five years ago, it feels as ancient as the Acropolis to many of the players on this year's U.S. Olympic women's soccer team.

Since that euphoric penalty kick landed Chastain on the covers of Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and People magazines, the United States has struggled to maintain its global dominance. Losses at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and last year's World Cup on American soil are indications that the rest of the globe is catching up to us in women's soccer, and Mia Hamm believes the U.S. players have nobody to blame but themselves.

``It tells me that the popularity and the quality of our sport is on the rise among women, and we'd like to think our successes had something to do with that,'' said Hamm, who will bring down the curtain on her extraordinary soccer career at the Athens Games.

``But it's also been difficult for us to accept because we are competitive athletes and we set the bar so high and have such high expectations for ourselves. It's been frustrating when we haven't achieved what we've wanted to.''

Those frustrations have helped fuel the U.S. team during coach April Heinrichs' rigorous, five-month pre-Olympic camp.

``There's definitely a hunger there,'' Hamm says. ``But hunger alone won't get us back on top. We need to re-think our approach and our strategy. We need to be versatile and sophisticated enough to play different systems and attack teams in different ways. We discovered from the World Cup that teams such as Sweden and Germany have taken the game to a new level. They've raised the stakes and upped the ante. It's up to us to respond and re-raise the bar.''

Much is riding on these Olympics. For starters, this is expected to be the last hurrah for the team's veteran core group - Hamm, Chastain, Kristine Lilly, Julie Foudy and Joy Fawcett.

``They set the standard for us,'' said Abby Wambach, 23, one of the team's rising stars. ``They were the women whose posters we hung on our bedroom walls. They blazed the trail for us, so the last thing we want to do is let them down. We want to send them out as winners.''

Also at stake is the future of women's professional soccer in the United States. The Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA) folded last year after two years of operation. It was launched off the popularity of America's dramatic `99 World Cup victory.

``We believe it could fly again and we think this Olympics could give us the momentum we need,'' said Wambach, who led the 2003 World Cup team in scoring with three goals. ``I know it was Mia's hope and the hope of the other veterans that this league would give female soccer players the same professional sports opportunities as their male counterparts. A lot of us younger players want to establish a legacy just like the players before us did. This would be a good start for us.''

Hamm and the other veterans are more than ready to hand over the torch.

``That's how you sustain your sport,'' said veteran goalkeeper Briana Scurry. ``We had a core group that came up together and matured together and won together, and we believe we seasoned players have an obligation to pass on that knowledge and that sense of tradition to the younger players. You can't go on playing forever, but your tradition can.''

Although the demise of the WUSA was a blow, something positive did come from it - something that might propel the U.S. back to the top of the podium in Athens.

``It's enabled us to train and play and bond together as a team over a period of months,'' Scurry said. ``If the WUSA were in operation this spring and summer, that wouldn't have been possible because the majority of us would have had obligations to our teams. We probably would have only had a few weeks to try to make it all come together, and that would have been extremely difficult.''